Time Analysis for Scanning Project

July 28, 2009 7:46 AM

Does anyone know where I can get a breakdown of the amount of time for each step in a scanning project?

Part of my job is to give presentations on scanning paper records to digital formats. A lot of our audience (government agencies) wants to scan things like personnel files, client files etc. that can have a lot of different types of paper documents in them: different sizes, condition, paper thickness, staples, paper clips, etc.

We have been using this time analysis graph from a New York State Archives workshop from 2001. I know scanners have improved a lot since then and was wondering if anyone knew of something similar but more up to date. I have not had any luck with searching the internet.

posted by marxchivist to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

The only experience I have is with scanning my own things, but from looking at that document, I am not sure how much has changed, but the document preparation time seems a little long. Usually when I scan, I just put it in the scanner, then scan it. Depending on the resolution, that could take about a minute. Then I save it somewhere and open it up in Photoshop to sclean it up. That takes longer. Maybe 4 minutes to adjust its brightness and contrast and to clean up spots and scratches. Then I save it again. I have no idea about indexing. I don't know what kind of metadata you want to attach to it, or what kind of library system you have for retrieval. Depending on the amount of information you want to attach to it, it could take longer than the cleanup.
posted by Sully at 6:51 PM on July 28, 2009